Word: memoirists
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...readers may feel that the hero's affronted psyche is a bit fragile. Novelist John O'Hara, who never went to college, used to be fascinated by this sort of folderol, and his friends joked about taking up a collection to send him to Princeton. Wolff is a skilled memoirist (The Duke of Deception) and novelist (Inklings), but maybe somebody should arrange a scholarship for him at Michigan State...
Readers can be persuaded to care, however, if the memoirist is Reynolds Price (The Source of Light, Kate Vaiden), one of a few writers whose full- length fictions do honor to the term regional novel. Price's region is central North Carolina, where he has lived for most of his 56 years. His father Will was a traveling salesman who fought a lifelong battle against alcohol and financial insecurity. His mother Elizabeth was one of the genteel metal magnolias who, despite generosity to their black servants, Price notes, were the "chief conveyors" of the racist code that cursed...
...until 1963, when Kennedy was assassinated. Yet to come were full-scale war in Viet Nam, civil unrest, Watergate, gas lines, stagflation, and the proliferation of junk food and junk politics. Unsurprisingly these not-so-good times provided Baker with his best material as a columnist. But as a memoirist he seems to be finding that Russell Baker is a tough act to follow, especially if you are Russell Baker...
...famous apercu, author Mary McCarthy charged that everything written by playwright-memoirist Lillian Hellman was a lie, "including 'and' and 'the.' " Much the same, Seagrave argues, could be said of Ferdinand Marcos, who blithely concocted a past for his official biographies that bore scant relationship to the truth. Ferdinand claims to be the first son of Mariano Marcos, a provincial teacher and sometime member of Congress. According to Seagrave, there is strong circumstantial evidence -- including his subject's distinctively sinoid features -- that the real father was Judge Ferdinand Chua, scion of a wealthy, politically powerful Chinese clan who came...
When the U.S. began deploying its missiles on schedule in late 1983, the Soviets walked out of the talks in Geneva and sulked in their tents for nearly 16 months. Haig had staged his own walkout from the Administration in 1982. As a quit-and-tell memoirist two years later, he bitterly denounced the zero option as a killer proposal, designed to be rejected. Now, as a Republican presidential candidate, he is criticizing the INF treaty as strategically unsound. All three Richards have also moved on. Allen has been succeeded by five National Security Advisers. Perle is presiding over seminars...